We go hands-on with the latest gaming gadgets at the 2014 Game Developers Conference

We had the chance to check out GDC 2014 held in San Francisco, CA and this year was really about virtual reality. We had everything from the Oculus Rift development kit 2 to Sony’s Project Morpheus and a bunch of VR accessories and peripherals thrown in for good measure.

Resize multiple images at once for free with IrFanView

Resizing images can be a monotonous task, especially, if you're trying to change the resolution/size of more than 100 images. Luckily free batch imaging software IrfanViewcan batch resize photos quickly and easily. For those who don’t know what batch processing is, it's taking a group of photos and editing them all at once using the same set of editing commands. For example, if you want to edit a group of 1920x1080 images and resize them to 1280x720 or simply want smaller-sized images to email/store on a small USB stick, you can have IrfanView reduce the size of all the images at the same time, so you don’t have to do it for each individual photo. Considering the program is free to use, we wanted to show you how you can quickly save time and energy editing your photos.

What's it like to build in three of the most unusual cases on the market?

A generation ago, computer cases were typically beige pizza box–shaped things that resided under beige CRT monitors. You wrangled floppy disks in and out of them and pressed the power button at times, but they weren't conversation pieces or personal statements. We don't know exactly when the shift to case fanciness occurred. It evolved gradually, like facial hair or Nicolas Cage. And in the last few years, we've seen some pretty exotic enclosures come to the home desktop, in various degrees of affordability and physical dimensions. You may wonder what it's like to build inside one of these strange containers; we certainly did. To find out, we had three distinctly different unconventional cases delivered to our Lab: the Cooler Master HAF Stacker 935, the In Win D-Frame, and the Corsair Carbide Air 540 that are pictured here.

Note: This article was originally featured in our Holiday 2013 issue of the magazine.

10 great games from 10 years of Unreal Engine 3

Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) turned 10 years old this month, so we took a look back at some of the best games using the engine. Available for licensees since March 2004, UE3 represented a huge leap for the Unreal Engine. It boasts support for pretty much every platform—mobile, Windows, OS X, and all of the consoles. It's so popular with developers that even the FBI decided to license the engine for a training simulator.

Baseline, performance, and ultra PC builds!

What time is it? It's time to Build a PC with our Blueprints! This month, we've built three rigs at three approximate price points: Baseline, Performance, and Ultra. Baseline gets you a powerful system for gaming and content creation at 1080p, Performance beefs everything up across the board, and Ultra lets the dogs out.

Microsoft isn’t returning the beloved Start Menu to Windows 8 anytime soon. But hope is not lost, thanks to these handy third-party tools!

Beyond all of the colorful tiles; the bolted-on Modern user interface; the giant, full-screen apps and panels; and the inability to boot to the desktop—to name just a few of our gripes—there’s one issue above all others that’s guaranteed to universally frustrate Windows 8 desktop users: the Start Menu.

Note: This article was originally featured in the September 2013 issue of the magazine.

Best websites to visit when you’re bored

Before the Internet came into its own, finding something to do to cure boredom was a task in and of itself. At work, you could count the holes in the ceiling, crumple pieces of paper and practice your cubicle hook shot, or get lost in a game of Minesweeper, all the while hoping your boss wouldn't wander by.

Note: This article was originally featured in our Holiday 2013 issue of the magazine.

A ferocious free-for-all among the top web browsers

The landscape is evolving and you can either change with it or be left behind. This is the position browser makers find themselves in as cloud computing and touch interfaces take center stage, as Windows 8 with its vastly overhauled UI continues to wiggle into more homes and businesses around the world, and as web developers push increasing amounts of rich content at site visitors.

Note: This article was originally featured in the December 2013 issue of the magazine.

The basics of building an open-air test bench

The Mission While we typically follow a standard formula for Build It every month, sometimes it's nice to deviate a bit from the norm and explore different types of systems that are a bit more unconventional. One such system is the type of build we use at Maximum PC HQ for testing hardware, known as the open-air test bench. We have several of them deployed throughout the office alongside our standard-issue desktop PCs, and both types of machines serve an important purpose. The standard desktops are great for YouTube and Reddit, and occasional “work,” while the open-air test benches are used for most of our component testing since they let us swap a video card, CPU, SSD, RAM stick, or even the entire motherboard with minimal effort. When you’re using an open test bench setup on top of a desk, you’ll never again have to dig through the guts of your computer while on your hands and knees, with a flashlight clenched in your teeth. All you need to set up one for yourself is a basic set of spare parts, and it will let you operate like a civilized gentleperson, from the comfort of a chair, without breaking a sweat.

Note: This article was originally featured in the November 2013 issue of the magazine.